Bleeding ink and words @zeldahowell - Tumblr Blog

the worst thing about writing or any kind of craft is having an idea you're really excited to make a reality but then you sit down and realize how much work it's going to take to get to that point and suddenly you feel like those two little gay guys in the mountain in the lord of the rings

valtsv

do you remember how good it was in our head mr frodo

ace-trainer-alice

I promise it's not horny content, I'm just a normal horror author that deals with themes like denial of autonomy and manipulation. Definitely in no way a pervert. I mean, I'm ace, how would that work? Ignore the funny feeling beneath your stomach, it's totally all safe for work content. See, there's no sex. If there's no sex in something that means it's safe for work. That's how it works. Now keep reading I have more things to convince you.

literaticat

Do you have advice on being sad/dealing with shelving (will come back) or trunking (out of mind) or trashing (no hope) novels after spending roughly a year on them, and extra sadness at the idea a new one with a lot of effort and heart would also fail? Thanks!

Please know that, while this may sound "harsh", I truly mean it in as gentle and good-humored a way as possible. Like, I'm gonna hold your hand when I say this:

Babe, you need to toughen up a little.

Here's something that I've learned, 20 years into this business, having watched hundreds of authors doing their author thing -- and something YOU will see if you stick around, too -- the authors that are most successful are the ones who are FLEXIBLE and have a GROWTH MINDSET.

Lots of authors -- all authors?!? -- write books that don't sell, either because they aren't good enough yet, or the market isn't right, or there is some fatal flaw in them that they didn't see at first, or just timing/luck, or who knows why. Even highly published and successful authors who you definitely know their names! That's literally part of being an author.

The trick, I think, is not to think of these manuscripts as "failures". They aren't failures. Most successful authors have at LEAST one book that never will see the light of day. (The first pancake, if you will.) And many have lots more than that.

After all, the only way to learn to write books is to TRY AND WRITE BOOKS. Not all of them are going to be GREAT books.

Let's put it this way: If you were teaching somebody to draw a horse, and they sketched a bunch of wonky horses, you wouldn't be like "you're a failure. You suck at horse drawing, you'll never draw a horse." Because sketching wonky horses and making them into better horses is literally how you learn to draw a horse. If the person drew a pretty dang good horse, but still not a GREAT horse, you probably wouldn't say "ok, you spent a lot of time on this horse and I can tell you poured your heart into it, but it's not good enough yet. So probably your next attempt will also suck, you should quit it with the horses." -- YOU WOULDN'T SAY THAT. BECAUSE YOU AREN'T A MONSTER! OBVIOUSLY IF THEY STICK WITH IT, THEIR HORSES WILL GET BETTER AND BETTER! So if you wouldn't say it to your Horse Artist, why would you say it to YOURSELF??

So off the horse and back to trunked/shelves ms. Maybe that manuscript, though flawed, taught you how to do some craft things that you needed to learn. Now you can use that knowledge to grow and apply it to your next book.

Or maybe that manuscript just wasn't strong enough, but there are characters and scenes that you can repurpose at some later time for a different story, and they will be better for your having lived in their world before.

Or maybe the timing wasn't right for that story when you wrote it, but the day will come for it later. I've sold books fully a decade after the author first wrote it, because new editors came on the scene or fashions changed or whatever. Having shelved those books in the first place doesn't make them failures -- those authors sold OTHER books in between! And then, when the timing was right, they were more experienced, etc, they dusted the old book off, revised it, and tried it again successfully!

Basically, I'm not saying you aren't allowed to be sad about something -- feel your feelings, by all means! -- but also, realize that it is TOTALLY NORMAL to shelve/trunk some work, it's just part of the gig. The trick is not to let that experience derail you, but rather let it help you get better and stronger so you can move on and do the next thing. Those shelved books weren't failures -- they were learning experiences.

And just because you are turning your attention away from them at the moment doesn't mean you will never see them again; they will still be there later if you want to revisit them with fresh eyes at a later date. And you might at that time have the experience and ability to give them new life... or to realize, oh, bless them, they should have stayed hidden. ;-)

mckitterick

V.E. Schwab's advice for creating memorable characters - works for both protagonists and villains

source post: X

dduane

This is really good advice.

It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they'll start changing their own lives.

First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they're wrong about. There's usually a core misperception that they haven't examined. Once they're forced to engage with it, it'll start to change everything about their perception of the world they're inhabiting and/or the people in it.

Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character's great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they'll go to any lengths to avoid.

And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another... then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise... and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.

This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it's not. It's more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you'll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what's to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it's now being experienced and resolved in full.

This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.

But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that's a subject it's smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you're getting it right.

It's not unusual to get the wrong answers, or merely superficial ones, while you're still working out what's actually going on with the characters. So take your time. Eventually you'll find a set of answers that feel unquestionably right... and you can then nail those down in your notes and get on with making the kind of "good trouble" for your characters that will see them made complete.

#writing advice

571rr-deactivated20251227

I talked with someone who works in book publishing, and they mentioned they get a lot of AI slop these days. I asked how they know what's human-written, and they said that there's one thing that will reveal AI slop without error, and that's the author not knowing their own creation.

A real author can talk about their story for hours. They love to elaborate every character, every twist, every detail. Because those existed in their head long before they ever made it to the paper. They were loved before they were written.

AI slop wasn't. It was just vomited into existence.

Someone who generates their story with AI will never bond with their story the way real writers do. That's why they may not know what to say when they're asked why did the character do this, or even remember the scene in the first place. It's something they read, not something they wrote. And to a writer, those are not the same.

There's a unique bond between the creator and the creation. If your writing doesn't come of you, you'll always lack that.

I keep hearing soon we won't be able to tell. And perhaps, in a superficial sense, that's true. But there is a difference. It's not em dashes or repeated words. It's whether the story was made by someone who loves it and cares about it.

If the writer's eyes light up when asked why did the character do that? and they start their very own Ted Talk about that specific scene...

then it's real.

sendhelpthankyou

I hate writing. I hate writing so much it's slowly driving me insane. but I actually love it though like I would never stop, it's my first love and the only way to stay sane

marypsue

One of the worst feelings in the world: when you are just desperate, like claw-your-own-skin-off desperate, to create, but the only thing that even vaguely appeals to you to work on is a nebulous half-feeling that might be dreamily related to some half-formed notion of a concept. I must! Make! No thing! Only make!

marypsue

Everything is boring. All activity is meaningless. I understand why Sherlock Holmes did cocaine.

solarsthoughts

yes writing is hard but at least it makes me scream into my pillow whenever i find a plot hole and question my entire life over the use of an em dash.

jonphaedrus

writing a book is so stupid. first you gotta cut yourself open and find words in there. then you gotta put those words in an order no other human being has ever put words in. then you gotta decide that the brand new order you put those words in isnt a good order at all actually. then you gotta find new words in there. and then you gotta do that over and over and over again until there's a deadline. and then you stop doing it and you go put words elsewhere. who invented this.

jonphaedrus

nondelphic

writing isn’t hard it’s just emotionally devastating and time-consuming and requires full body possession by an idea

thewriteadviceforwriters

Why I Edit As I Write (Even Though Everyone Says Not To)

hi. it's me. the writer who edits mid-sentence. the writer who literally cannot move on from chapter one until chapter one feels right. the writer who rewrites the same paragraph fourteen times before letting themselves move to the next. yes i've seen every single "just write, fix it later" post. yes, i love the idea of messy first drafts. and no i will not be changing

okay so listen everyone, here's the thing: i DON'T think editing as you go is inherently bad. it's only bad advice when people try to universalize it. writing process is personal. maybe for you it's a fast draft in November and editing in february. maybe for me it's hyper-fixating on every single sentence until the scene flows like water and then moving on with peace in my soul. BOTH ARE VALID. BOTH CAN WORK. both get the book done.

people love to say "don't edit while you draft" because, yeah perfectionism can slow you down. listen, i'm not editing for perfection, im editing for immersion. i need to feel like i'm inside the story or I'LL SPIRAL! if i know the voice is off, pacing is weird, or the character feels flat, i can't pretend i don't see it and continue. i can't push through. my brain physically will NOT LET ME!

when something sounds wrong or looks wrong, it breaks the spell. it kicks me out of the scene like a bad special effects in a movie. no seriously!! and once i'm out it's really hard pt get back in.

also, i'm gonna be real, i hate the feeling of finishing a draft and knowing the entire thing is a flaming wreck i now have to sift through. i HATE that feeling. it makes me never want to open that doc again. i need to be able to re-read my work and go, "okay yeah, this slaps a little." that's how i keep going. a little dopamine hit every few pages. if you call that toxic? i call it necessary.

side notes: there's a weird gatekeeping vibe around speed in the writing world. people act like if you're not cranking out 50k in 30 days, you're "not disciplined." but i'd argue that forcing yourself to write in a way that actively hurts your process isn't discipline. it's sabotage. if editing as i go keeps me working on a project long-term, keeps me engaged, keeps be BELIEVING in it, then it's a valid method

my best scenes? the ones i took slow. the ones i sculpted sentence by sentence. the ones i paused to read out loud, rework, and reimagine until the tension finally clicked. yeah it took hours. yeah it was annoying. but that scene still holds. it still makes me feel something. and that’s worth more to me than blasting through 10k of filler.

edit while you write. reread the last paragraph twelve times. fix that one clunky sentence before you let yourself go on. obsess a little. it’s fine.

rin t.

#writing advice

gatheringbones

[“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.”]

kurt vonnegut

#writing advice

ironforest4

I do not "draft", I do not "edit", I do not "proofread", I do not "beta". I WRITE. And if I don't like it, I take a break for 2 years

podcastwizard

affirmations for writers: i know how to write. i have seen sentences before, and i know how to make one. i can identify up to several words and their meanings. i am not afraid of semicolons.

podcastwizard

affirmations for writers: i know how to write. i have seen sentences before, and i know how to make one. i can identify up to several words and their meanings. i am not afraid of semicolons.

maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house.

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well.

It is only about two statements that I saw go by:

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing.

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously.

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers.

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half.

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing.

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy.

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought.

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out.

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story.

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